With Economic Plans, GOP Abandons Middle Class Entirely
I have watched with a truly curious sense of amazement as the Republicans, especially the presidential candidates, have stuck it to the middle class.
What have they been thinking with their tax plans and their relentless pursuit of even greater tax-cut largess for the very wealthiest of Americans? What do they have against the middle class, those who have seen their incomes drop by 4.8 percent this past decade, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal?
The latest Republican proposal made to the Senate’s Gang of 12 “supercommittee” is to lower the tax rate on the top wage earners from 35 percent to 28 percent; this on top of the temporary tax cut that Bush provided. The Republicans propose various revenue increases to help reduce the budget deficit but take them away with this giveaway to the wealthy.
Once again, the middle class is left holding the bag, watching as they get stuck with less take-home pay and more expenses for rent, mortgage, college tuition, basic essentials.
Let’s look at the Republican presidential candidates‘ tax proposals. Governor Perry has proposed a huge tax windfall for those whose income averages over a million dollars. For those millionaires and billionaires, he would give them a $512,733 average tax break! How can that possibly be justified since these wage earners have seen a 385 percent increase in their wealth over the last 20 years?
Perry’s plan would actually see tax rates go up for those who make less that $50,000, according to the Tax Policy Center.
Herman Cain’s pie in the sky 9-9-9 plan would see the poor and middle class lose with a 15.8 percent drop; those families who make the average of $49,445 would see their effective tax rate go from 14.3 percent to 23.8 percent, according to the Tax Policy Center.
The Romney tax plan is more of the same. More tax cuts for the wealthy: 67 percent of his lower capital gains taxes would go to millionaires; 50 percent of the continuation of the Bush tax cuts go to the top 5 percent of wage earners.
The policy prescriptions we are seeing from Republicans as we approach 2012 are coupled with a complete lack of explanation of why it is important to help middle-class families. All their rhetoric is ideological—anti-Washington, anti-government, anti-taxes. They have drunk the Grover Norquist Kool-Aid, even to the detriment of those families struggling to make it in a tough economy.
The benefits go to Wall Street, not Main Street; the analyses of all the tax plans clearly point to giveaways to those top 2 percent of Americans, with the squeeze put on those in the middle.
As they campaign in the next 12 months, the Republicans will find it increasingly difficult to make the case that they stand for hard-working, middle-class families. This could well be their downfall come next November.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, November 9, 2011
Since Corporations Are “People”, They Should Have A Pledge Of Allegiance
Despite what the Supreme Court and Mitt Romney say, corporations aren’t people. (I’ll believe they are when Georgia and Texas start executing them.)
The Court thinks corporations have First Amendment rights to spend as much as they want on politics, and Romney (and most of his fellow Regressives) think they need lower taxes and fewer regulations in order to be competitive.
These positions are absurd on their face. By flooding our democracy with their shareholders’ money, big corporations are violating their shareholders’ First Amendment rights because shareholders aren’t consulted. They’re simultaneously suppressing the First Amendment rights of the rest of us because, given how much money they’re throwing around, we don’t have enough money to be heard.
And they’re indirectly giving non-Americans (that is, all their foreign owners, investors, and executives) a say in how Americans are governed. Pardon me for being old-fashioned but I didn’t think foreign money was supposed to be funneled into American elections.
Romney’s belief big corporations need more money and lower costs in order to create jobs is equally baffling. Big corporations are now sitting on $2 trillion of cash and enjoying near-record profits. The ratio of profits to wages is higher than it’s been since before the Great Depression. And a larger and larger portion of those profits are going to top executives. (CEO pay was 40 times the typical worker in the 1980s; it’s now upwards of 300 times.)
But, hey, if the Supreme Court and regressive Republicans insist big corporations are people and want to treat them as American citizens, then why not demand big corporations take a pledge of allegiance to the United States?
And if they don’t take the pledge, we should boycott them. (Occupiers — are you listening?)
Here’s what a Corporate Pledge of Allegiance might look like:
The Corporate Pledge of Allegiance to the United States
The [fill in blank] company pledges allegiance to the United States of America. To that end:
We pledge to create more jobs in the United States than we create outside the United States, either directly or in our foreign subsidiaries and subcontractors.
If we have to lay off American workers, we will give them severance payments equal to their weekly wage times the number of weeks they’ve work for us.
We further pledge that no more than 20 percent of our total labor costs will be outsourced abroad.
We pledge to keep a lid on executive pay so no executive is paid more than 50 times the median pay of American workers. We define “pay” to include salary, bonuses, health benefits, pension benefits, deferred salary, stock options, and every other form of compensation.
We pledge to pay at least 30 percent of money earned in the United States in taxes to the United States. We won’t shift our money to offshore tax havens and won’t use accounting gimmicks to fake how much we earn.
We pledge not to use our money to influence elections.
Companies that make the pledge are free to use it in their ads over the Christmas shopping season.
By: Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, Robert Reich Blog, November 8, 2011
The Intransigent “Do Nothing GOP Congress” And Election 2012
The Republicans in Congress have made a wager. They’ve bet the political ranch that they will destroy Barack Obama’s chances for re-election if they can block his proposals to produce jobs.
In fact, it’s the GOP that could lose big when the votes are counted a year from now.
Republicans completely control the House. In the Senate they can use the filibuster to prevent anything from passing.
Last week, for the third time this fall, Republicans successfully blocked Obama’s jobs program in the Senate. Of course this came as absolutely no surprise, since Senate Republican Leader told the world earlier this year — in no uncertain terms — that his top legislative priority was to prevent the re-election of the president.
McConnell, and his House counterpart, John Boehner, don’t lose a wink of sleep over concerns that their intransigence harms the economic prospects of everyday Americans. In their view, the worse the economy gets, the more likely the voters will be to boot President Obama out of the Oval Office.
But a good case can be made that these guys will end up being too clever by half — that in fact they are providing fuel for precisely the argument that could defeat them in 2012.
McConnell and Boehner are right that it is very hard for an incumbent president to win re-election in a bad economy. And unless something dramatically changes, most Americans won’t think much of their own economic circumstances when Election Day rolls around next year.
So next year’s election will turn largely on one question: who does the American people hold responsible for what will likely still be a lousy economy?
Republicans are relying on the simple proposition that the guy in charge — the president — is to blame. But every day of intransigence increases the odds that in fact, they themselves will get the rap.
In 1945 Vice President Harry Truman became president when Franklin Roosevelt died in office. After the War, Truman presided over a substantial post-war recession that helped make him “unelectable” in the eyes of most pundits and politicians. GDP dropped by a whopping 12%. His political viability was complicated further when the Democratic base split into three parts. A portion followed Progressive Henry Wallace and much of the Southern Democratic white vote (the south was a Democratic base at the time) supported Strom Thurmond’s segregationist Dixiecrat Party. In the April before the election, Truman’s overall approval rating in the Gallup poll was just 36%.
But, Truman barnstormed the country, traveling 21,000 miles on a “whistle stop” tour where he decried the “do-nothing Republican Congress.” Though the economy began a modest improvement in 1948, no one — but Truman himself — believed he had a chance to defeat Thomas Dewey — a former Governor cut out of the same elite cloth as Mitt Romney. Truman won.
Obama can do exactly the same thing. Even assuming that the economy continues to experience only modest improvements over the next year, the Obama campaign can lay the lack of progress where it belongs — at the feet of the “do-nothing Republican Congress” that is intent on stalling economic recovery for their own political gain.
And where Truman’s 1946 recession was largely the result of the post war demobilization, Obama can rightly claim that this economic disaster was the product of precisely the same Republican policies that his opponents intend to re-instate if they regain control of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Not only has the GOP refused to support Democratic measures to put Americans back to work, their alternative “jobs program” features no direct, measurable job creation whatsoever. Instead it relies on the same “trickle down” economic theory that didn’t create one net private sector job in the eight years before the Great Recession – and the same unwillingness to rein in the big Wall Street banks that led to the worst financial collapse in 65 years.
But that’s not all. Everyone agrees that the Republican House Majority was swept into office last November precisely because of the terrible economy. But instead of job creation, they’ve busied themselves focusing on trying to defund Planned Parenthood, protecting Americans from the imaginary threat of Sharia Law, and fending off non-existent attack on the use of “In God We Trust.” The Republican controlled House hasn’t voted on a single job creation measure since John Boehner and his colleagues took power last January.
In the deliberations of the “Super Committee,” Republicans have been completely unwilling to give on the fundamental question of whether millionaires should be asked to pay to put America’s economic house in order. The view of the Republican leadership is that — in addition to defeating President Obama — their principal mission is to act as guard dogs for the exploding incomes of the top 1%.
In the upcoming fight over the next fiscal year’s appropriation bills, there is every indication that the Republicans will demand that riders be attached limiting the power of the EPA and restricting funding for contraception — which surveys show is used by 98% of American women.
Battles like these will do nothing but strengthen the Democratic narrative that the GOP leadership is focusing on bread and circuses for its base, while it intentionally blocks measures that could provide jobs to construction workers, fire fighters, cops, teachers and millions other out-of-work Americans.
Then there is the House schedule. Last week the Boehner team published a House schedule for next year intended to guarantee that very little gets done. The House will be in session only 94 days in all of next year (including many days where votes are postponed until 6PM) and will continue its habit of going into recess virtually every third week. Yet another example of a “do-nothing Republican Congress.”
It’s no accident, that while the polls show that most officials in the American government have fallen into disrepute for their failure to get the economy moving again, Congressional Republicans win the prize for negative ratings. Gallup shows Obama’s approval ratings beginning to edge up — from a very low 38%, up to 43%. Some other polls show it rising to 47%. The average rating from Real Clear Politics currently stands at 45.4%.
Meanwhile, Congressional job approval ranges from 9% to 16%, with a Real Clear Politics average of 12.7%.
The recent Democracy Corps poll shows that favorability for Republicans in Congress trails the Republican Party as a whole, Democrats in Congress, the Democratic Party as a whole, and President Obama.
On the other hand, the president’s agenda itself is overwhelmingly popular. His jobs bill is supported by the vast majority of Americans — and becomes more popular the more voters hear about it. When its provisions were explained, 63% offered their support in the October Wall Street Journal/NBC poll. That’s why it’s so important for the White House to continue pressing Congress to pass the bill as a whole — and to focus on its individual parts.
Funding jobs for teachers, firefighters and cops is very popular. Repairing deteriorating schools is very popular. Building roads, ports and airports is very popular. Providing unemployment benefits for those who are out of work is very popular.
And paying for it all by taxing millionaires and billionaires has the support of two thirds to three fourths of Americans — including a majority of Republicans. An October National Journal poll found 68% of voters support the Democratic proposal for a surtax on millionaires to pay for the jobs bill.
In fact, the whole 99% versus 1% message frame that has dominated the airwaves since everyday people began Occupying Wall Street — is very popular — as are the president’s executive actions to improve the economy without Congressional approval.
And what is unpopular? The Republican plan to abolish Medicare and replace it with vouchers – that is really unpopular. In fact, most polls find that 70% of voters oppose cutting Social Security and Medicare to reduce the deficit.
Creating jobs, making the 1% pay their fair share, and protecting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will be the defining symbolic issues next year — and on every one of them Democrats hold the high political ground and Republicans have to walk through the valley of political death.
Finally, of course, is the matter of whom the Republicans will nominate as an alternative to President Obama. Unfortunately for the GOP, Presidential elections are not always referenda on the incumbent — they are choices between two living, breathing people — and in this case two clearly distinguishable futures for our country.
The conventional wisdom holds that Romney is the Republican’s strongest contender. If he is — which I doubt — he is no Rocky Balboa.
There are two lines of attack on Romney that are toxic:
He clearly has no core values.
When voters accuse someone of being a typical “politician” they mean someone is a candidate who has no center — who decides what he believes depending entirely on the political winds. Romney could serve as the dictionary definition of “politician.” He has done “one eighties” on everything from abortion rights to health care. He is a political weathervane whose guiding principle is only one thing: what will advance the political career of Mitt Romney?
In 2004, immediately before the election, Gallup showed George W. Bush with an approval rating of 48% approval to 47% disapproval — not much different than President Obama enjoys today. But a not very popular Bush won re-election — largely by convincing large numbers of swing voters that John Kerry had no core values, that he was a flip flopper. They succeeded even though Kerry was a war hero and had a strong record of standing up for what he believed. How much easier will it be to convince everyday Americans that Romney has no core values – since he doesn’t.
Romney is the poster boy for the 1%.
He feels like the guy who fired your brother-in-law. He is in fact the guy who, some time back, gathered his crowd of young Wall Street hot shots around him after he completed a big deal at Bain Capital and posed for a picture with money dripping from their mouths and pockets and ears. He’s a guy who made his fortune dismantling companies and firing workers.
Of course, none of these facts are intended to make Progressives complacent — far from it. None of them guarantees we will win in 2012 — only that we can.
For the first two years of the Obama Administration, Progressives took a lot of ground.
There was:
Health Care for All Americans
Wall Street Reform
Avoiding another Great Depression
Saving a million jobs in the American auto industry
Expanding Medicaid
Eliminating Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
Expanding Children’s Health
Environmental Reform
Expanding Labor Rights
Expanding Civil Liberties
Equal Pay for Equal Work
Now Obama is ending the War in Iraq.
But last fall the Empire struck back. All of the corporate, special interest money fought back with a vengeance. It fought back because that’s the nature of change. The forces of the status quo don’t just roll over and play dead. They do everything they can to hang onto their money and power and privilege.
Now we have to hold our ground and prepare a winning counter offensive — and it won’t be easy, especially in light of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that magnifies the power of corporate cash.
But if they win — if America has President Romney or Perry or Cain, Senate Majority Leader McConnell and Speaker Boehner — they have made it crystal clear what they will do. They will return America to the Gilded Age. They will roll back the twentieth century — they will rip apart the entire social contract.
They will privatize Social Security, destroy Medicare, emasculate the labor movement, cut taxes further for corporations and the wealthy. They will create new radical conservative facts on the ground that they hope will entrench conservative power for generations.
But they believe their real key to victory is lack of enthusiasm among Progressives. They believe that Progressives — and many in the Democratic base — will stay home next November.
They will be wrong.
That’s because over the next year, the progressive forces in America will rise to the battle. In their own way, the Occupy movement has already shown that Progressives will stand and fight.
They will rise to the battle because they realize that the 2012 election is not just about two people running for President. It is about a moral question. It’s about two competing sets of values. It’s all about how we see ourselves as a nation — as a society. It’s about whether we will be a society based on the precepts of radical conservative social Darwinism, or a society rooted in the progressive values that have always defined the promise of America.
We will not allow them to destroy Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
We will not allow them to destroy the American labor movement.
We will not allow them to destroy the middle class.
We will not allow them to destroy the American dream.
And we will remember a central lesson of history: that before change happens it seems impossible. And after change happens it seems inevitable.
American history — human history — is the story of ever-expanding human freedom. There may be ups and downs, but when you back up from the big chart of history, the trend is up.
I believe that our time is no exception — that next year — in this crossroads election — we will do what is necessary to assure that America once again recommits herself to create a brighter future for the next generation than those that went before.
That’s what the revolutionaries that created this nation did. That’s what the soldiers who fought and died to defend it did. That’s what the sit-down strikers who created the labor movement did. That’s what the freedom riders who fought for civil rights did. And that is precisely what we will do again in 2012.
By: Robert Creamer, Political Organizer, Strategist and Author, Published in The Huffington Post, November 7, 2011
Cutting Taxes For The Rich Never Ends Well
You can call it 9-9-9, the Perry two-step, or a national sales tax. But the various flat tax plans being proposed by Republican candidates, right-wing think tanks, and media commentators share some common characteristics that should worry most middle-class Americans.
The basic notion behind a flat tax is to eliminate the current system of six tax brackets—in which people with higher incomes pay higher tax rates—with a single uniform rate. Most flat tax proposals also eliminate most or all of the deductions and credits in the current code—such as the mortgage interest deduction, the deduction for charitable giving, and hundreds of lesser-used preferences.
The flat tax is certainly a good deal for high-income individuals. Although they might not get to deduct mortgage interest payments on their vacation homes, those with high incomes more than make up for it in the lower, “flatter” rate. For example, under a 20 percent flat tax (similar to the one proposed by Rick Perry), the top 1 percent would see an average tax cut of over $200,000.
If the rich are paying less, you can probably guess who would pay more: low- and moderate-income families. For example, under the Cain 9-9-9 plan, 90 percent of filers with incomes between $40,000 and $50,000 would see a tax increase averaging about $4,000. (The Perry plan gives taxpayers an option of staying in the current system—so it’s unlikely anyone would choose the flat tax option if it means higher taxes. Since low- and moderate-income taxpayers would see an increase under the 20 percent plan, the final result of the Perry plan would be the introduction of an exclusive tax code designed for the high-income individuals, while the rest of us get to keep the old clunker. See who would choose which plan.)
Because flat tax proposals lower rates at the top, and because the top is where an increasing share of income is being concentrated, they also tend to bring in significantly less revenue than the current tax code, resulting in higher deficits, fewer public investments, and pressure to cut programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Proponents of the flat tax argue that lower rates on the rich (or the “job-creators” as some are now calling them) and on income derived from stocks and bonds will boost economic growth and job creation. However, this trickle-down theory has been tried and failed: Bush-era policies moved the tax code in this direction, but the “boom” of the 2000s was the worst on record since at least the 1950s.
Tax cuts for the rich and a higher debt for everyone else? We’ve seen that movie before, and it doesn’t end well.
By: John Irons, Research and Policy Director, Economic Policy Institute; Published in U. S. News and World Report, November 1, 2011
Don’t Blame The GOP For Mitt Romney’s Flip-Flops
As former Gov. Mitt Romney gets battered by the likes of George Will, expect to hear a lot more arguments along the following lines.
It’s not Romney who is the flip-flopper. It’s the conservative movement. It was only three years ago that Jim DeMint was praising the Massachusetts healthcare plan. Post-2009, conservatives have flip-flopped on individual mandates, they have flip-flopped on monetary policy, in these cases they have adopted ever more extreme positions.
Yes Romney has had to shape-shift to keep pace, and that’s unfortunate. But don’t blame him—blame them.
God bless David, but this is too cute. It’s impossible to deny, at this point, that the idea of an individual mandate emerged from the right. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was forced to admit this onstage in the primary debate in Las Vegas.
But that hardly means the conservative movement has flip-flopped on the issue.
Sure, it was a feature of the Senate Republican alternative to Hillarycare, but that was spearheaded by Sens. Lincoln Chafee and Bob Dole. If Frum would like to make the case that those guys were emblematic movement conservatives, he can go right ahead.
I was around Capitol Hill in the late-’90s and, truth be told, I don’t remember hearing much about the mandate at all.
After Hillarycare unraveled, the healthcare debate came to focus on the late Rep. Charlie Norwood‘s “patients’ bill of rights.”
It was a genteel, middle-of-the-road proposal, sure to appeal to women voters (guaranteed access to OB-GYNs was a frequent talking point). It rattled around for a few years, garnered bipartisan support, but most Republicans were happy to see it wither.
On substance, conservatives pointed out, rightly, that the bill wouldn’t do anything to increase access to insurance. And so they proposed market-friendly solutions (“association health plans,” for example) that would have reduced the number of uninsured citizens by a few million.
That the patients bill of rights did nothing for the uninsured was always slightly embarrassing for Democrats to admit—but this was the safe, piecemeal strategy they had embraced until 2009, when they got regulations of that sort on insurance companies and coverage for most of the uninsured, the costs for which would have to be borne by healthy people not paying into insurance pools (hence the need for an individual mandate).
Look: I’m not denying that some Republicans have been more than a little squirrelly on the mandate. I’m just saying it was never an issue that movement conservatives seriously fought for, to the extent that they thought about it all.
Now, onto Michael Gerson, who praises Romney’s pragmatism and downplays the risk that he’ll flip-flop away from the movement after Inauguration Day. Moreover, Gerson argues that Romney’s “multiple choice” reputation will actually strengthen the movement’s grip on his presidency:
Precisely because he has a history of ideological heresy, it would be difficult for him to abandon his current, more conservative iteration. He has committed himself on key conservative issues. Having flipped, he could not flop without risking a conservative revolt. As a result, conservatives would have considerable leverage over a Romney administration.
This is interesting, I’ll admit.
I would agree with Gerson that the chances of Romney switching back to pro-choice on abortion is vanishingly small. Ditto for embryonic stem-cell research. There really is no plausible way for Romney to climb back from these positions.
And when Romney said recently that “the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us,” I was inclined to believe him. I can’t see his administration spending a penny on climate change.
The problem with Romney isn’t that he’s changed his mind on this or that issue. Every politician not named Rep. Ron Paul has done this.
The question Gerson and movement conservatives should be asking themselves about Romney isn’t whether, having checked the right box now, he’ll uncheck it later. It should be: Do you think he’d spend political capital or risk his presidency on any issue that you care about?
Put another way: Do you believe that Mitt Romney is more than nominally pro-life? Will he fight to change the status quo on abortion?
I suppose Gerson’s assurance depends, too, on what constitutes a “key issue.” Does the building of a border fence count? If so, does Gerson really believe that President Romney is going to build a “high-tech fence” to “secure the border”?
How about gays in the military? Romney’s most recent position on the issue is that he didn’t think “Don’t ask, don’t tell” should have been interfered with. Does Gerson think Romney, a la former Sen. Rick Santorum, will fight to reinstate the policy?
Does Gerson think that Romney will try to dismantle Obamacare in its entirety—or just the “worst aspects” of it?
Romney isn’t just a flip-flopper. He’s just downright weaselly.
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, November 2, 2011
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